“On the media” discute des fameuses petites lignes vertes et oranges qui m’énervent pendant les débats sur CNN. Ils en concluent que ce n’est pas statistiquement pertinent et que ça a effectivement des effets sur l’opinion des téléspectateurs (en citant quelques études), mais expliquent que ce n’est pas nécessairement mauvais :

“We’re social animals. We process information in the context of the people around us. We do watch our debates with friends or at a bar or in some sort of group environment, frequently, in part because we want to hear the reactions of other people. That’s in part why Nora Ephron and you and I can’t stop looking at that CNN line on the bottom of the screen.

I think it’s hard to argue, necessarily, that it’s a bad thing. In fact, the people who do it – the professors at SMU – see it as a way of shifting some of the balance of influence from pundits, who have been shown to be able to have a pretty strong effect with their pre- and post-debate spin and how they set expectations and frame the debates to actual voters. And even if it’s not a statistically significant sample size, these are real people, and them versus Andrea Mitchell, I -you know, doesn’t necessarily mean that one is better than the other.”

Merci à Jean-Philippe pour le lien.